Prudential’s Yardeni Joins Oak Associates

Prudential Financial Inc.’s Edward Yardeni, one of the most bullish strategists on Wall Street, said Tuesday that he had left the firm to join Oak Associates Ltd., a money manager that oversees more than $8 billion in assets.

Yardeni, 54, will be chief investment strategist at Akron, Ohio-based Oak Associates, a firm that manages mutual fund, pension and endowment assets. He held the same title at the brokerage unit of Prudential, where he had worked since 2002.

Prudential’s Edward Keon will succeed Yardeni, while keeping his positions as the firm’s chief U.S. equity strategist and director of quantitative research, a spokesman said.

“At some point, Wall Street strategists want to see if they are as good as they think they are,” Yardeni said in a telephone interview. “The only way you can do this is to go to a buy-side firm and establish a track record.”

Yardeni is one of the most optimistic strategists in Bloomberg News’ weekly survey of securities firms. He recommends that “moderately aggressive” investors put 70% of their assets in stocks, 20% in bonds and 10% in cash.

Yardeni is leaving Prudential as it scales back operations in a series of cost-cutting moves. The firm exited investment banking in December 2000 and sold its money-losing retail brokerage business to Wachovia Corp. in July 2003 to focus on institutional equities. In July, Prudential fired 27 people in the institutional equity research, trading and sales group.

Yardeni said in an interview that he expected the Standard & Poor’s 500 index to rally and finish the year at 1,190, which would be a 6% gain from Tuesday’s level. “The economy is growing, inflation is extremely low, interest rates remain tame and earnings growth is fantastic,” he said. “The underlying fundamentals are very bullish.”

Oak Associates is headed by Jim Oelschlager, who also has a strongly bullish view of the economy and the market.

Yardeni was ranked throughout the 1990s among the top three economists on Wall Street in Institutional Investor magazine’s poll of money managers.

One forecast he got wrong: He predicted in the late 1990s that computer malfunctions caused by the year 2000 date change could cause a global recession.